Booking Holdings CEO talks about AI boom opportunities
By Stephanie Mehta | Published: 2025-11-03 12:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – leadership
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Glenn Fogel joined dot-com darling Priceline in early 2000, a year after the travel site’s blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). “I joined one week before the Nasdaq peaked,” Vogel recalls. Within a year of his arrival, the stock price had fallen to $6 per share. By March 2002, the Nasdaq, a proxy for booming e-commerce and technology infrastructure companies going public, was down 77% from its highs in March 2000. “At the time, my mother was wondering if I still had a job,” Vogel joked.
Today, Vogel is the CEO and president of Booking Holdings — the parent company of Priceline, KAYAK, Booking.com, OpenTable, and other brands. His experience navigating the dot-com bubble (more on that in a bit) provides a compelling place from which to observe the current generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) boom. He sees similarities in the gold rush mentality in both booms: “There’s a lot of investment, a lot of new companies.” “Many of them won’t make it,” he says. Many investors will lose their money. Corporate investments in artificial intelligence reached $252.3 billion, and private investments in artificial intelligence reached $33.9 billion in 2024, according to a new report. Aggregated data By the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
The main difference between the dot-com bubble and now? “I would say in terms of the potential for human society, I think the potential transformations from the AI generation are much greater than what was possible from (startups) in the 1990s,” he says.
Vogel points to breakthroughs like Google’s AlphaFold model, which has decoded protein folding and could speed up drug discovery. “Every area of our society can be dramatically improved with new generation AI,” he says. “That’s what’s so exciting.”
Happy travelers
In travel, the risks may not be great, but the impact on daily life can be profound. “We probably won’t be able to save as many lives the way the health care industry will be able to do, but maybe we’ll make the experience a little happier,” he says.
In fact, the company is already deploying AI to reduce customer service wait times, using AI-powered public chatbots that can resolve issues instantly. When a human agent handles a call, bots generate summaries of the conversation and next steps — work that previously consumed a significant amount of an agent’s time.
Embracing emerging technology has been key to Booking Holdings’ survival. When predecessor company Priceline Group bought Booking.com in 2005, it gained Booking’s knack for leveraging Google’s paid search and cross-platform platforms that enabled the company to quickly test messaging to improve conversion rates. The company then bought travel search engine KAYAK in 2013 and restaurant booking platform OpenTable in 2014. Priceline Group changed its name to Booking Holdings in 2018.
The long view
Travel itself is currently experiencing a boom. Despite the economic uncertainty, U.S. consumers, especially those living at the top end of the market, remain so Prioritize travelwith airlines and hotels reporting strong demand for premium products. In fact, at the end of October, Booking Holdings reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings and said it was still seeing “flat travel demand trends” in the current quarter.
Having led Booking Holdings through the dot-com boom and bust — as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a near-total shutdown of travel — Vogel acknowledges that nothing rises forever.
“I don’t know when those bad times will come, but sometimes they will come,” he says. However, he takes a long-term view: “I know that travel will always increase in the long term. It’s human nature. . . . people want to travel.”
Is it different this time?
Do you agree that the societal benefits of AI companies and technologies dwarf the contributions of dot-coms? If so, what accomplishments excite you most? Send your examples to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’d love to share your scenarios in a future newsletter.
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(tags for translation) Booking Collectibles
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